'Nature and its defenders under attack', August 11, 2020

The COVID-19 pandemic triggered cascading consequences to long-standing problems in our country … The environment, in particular, has remained under the radar… We have lost an estimated P990.3 billion worth of our sovereign natural resources, including annual damages incurred in the West Philippine Sea, wholesale export of minerals to foreign economies, losses to the illegal wildlife trade, and sovereign guarantees in large dam and water projects. The Philippines became the world’s deadliest country for land and environmental defenders … the Duterte administration has abandoned all pretenses of greenwashing. The historic closure of big mines … has been recently … reversed. Mining and dredging, apparently, are now considered a strategy for economic recovery in response to COVID-19. President Duterte himself recently said that he will “open the borders” to the influx of dirty coal to boost economic activity… The anti-terrorism law … threatens to further inflame the already atrocious human rights situation faced by Filipino environmental defenders. Likewise, they ganged up on TV network giant ABS-CBN, also a known champion of environmental causes, by denying the renewal of its franchise for clearly political and self-serving motivations…